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Wednesday, November 28, 2012

Sex, evolution, and the suicide of modern feminism

(Originally posted by Pat on 5/14/10)

I am feeling stressed at the moment because today I dared enter the lion's den of a Facebook discussion about rape, feminism, and evolutionary psychology.
In
retrospect, I realize that many of the things I said were insensitive;
it was an inappropriate time to bring up these issues, and I didn't
state my points in the most tactful way I might have. Mea culpa, and I apologize for this. I should never have raised the issue in the first place, not in such a circumstance.
But
I was initially angered by how readily it came to these people to heap
insults upon men and masculinity, and how easily dismissed were any
thoughts of agency or responsibility that women might have in these
circumstances. I took it upon myself to respond to this, and because
evolutionary psychology is one of my fields, that response took the form
of considering the implications of evolutionary psychology on these
matters.
What I came to realize is that modern feminism is
destroying itself by making itself the enemy of science. A new feminism
is needed, and needed stat, before the coding patient dies forever.The
issue was sexual harassment, and how a large number of men don't seem
able to take a hint when they are rejected by women. They continue to
assert themselves sexually, often to the point of causing great
discomfort. A particular incident one of my acquaintances went through
raised the issue; this was shortly met by affirmations and further
anecdotes from others. Part of what set me off was that there was
general agreement with the sentiment "FUCK MEN"---namely, the suggestion
that men are inherently evil and aggressive and this is why there is
sexual harassment.
That's what most upset me and motivated me to
action; I shouldn't have let it. I should have just let the feminists
commiserate in their irrational hatred of Y chromosomes; sooner or later
the effects would wear off. But it made me very angry precisely because
this kind of reverse sexism is so tolerated by feminists. If you really
care about gender equality, you should be as offended by "FUCK MEN" as
you would be by "FUCK WOMEN". You should be as offended by "men are
pigs" as you would be by "women are whores". There is a lot of sexism in
this world, and most of it is indeed directed at women; but when it is
directed at men, you should be equally prepared to resist it. Clearly
most feminists are not; instead they think in the same "men vs. women"
terms and treat reverse sexism as if it were a just revenge.
So I
dove in; I explained why sexual harassment is a complicated issue and
that women are partly responsible for its existence. If women were not
so coy, so willing to "play hard to get"; if they were more willing to
accept submissive males and less willing to accept aggressive
males---then there would be a lot less sexual harassment. It would be a
failed mating strategy, and natural selection would destroy it as surely
as it destroyed the whale's feet and the ape's tail. In fact it might
even go away faster than that, because human beings have highly flexible
phenotypes and are rational; what man would approach women aggressively
if he knew submissiveness was the way to get laid?
I explicitly
stated that I was not trying to justify sexual harassment, nor was I
saying that this particular instance of harassment was in any way the
victim's fault. I think I made it very clear that I was looking for
causes, not excuses. In the process of making this argument I (probably
mistakenly) mentioned that harassment and rape rest on a continuum of
aggressive mating strategies, and pointed out that none of them would
exist if they didn't sometimes work. My point was of course that if we
want to get rid of them, we will need to understand their causes and
deal with those causes.
The response? Vitriolic anger. Not
the "vitriolic anger" that Richard Dawkins gets accused of when he says
"There almost certainly is no God" or "anyone who denies evolution is
ignorant"; no, real vitriolic anger. Name-calling, insults to my
character and my masculinity, accusations that I am a "rape apologist".
When asked for evidence, I deluged with evidence (admittedly just what I
found off the top of my head and Google Scholar; but it's a web forum,
what do you want?); and then I was told that I have a "narrow worldview"
and, less kindly, that I have my "head up [my] ass".
This is because I mentioned sexual violence and didn't simply repeat the canard that sexual violence is committed by bad men who are bad and
that's all there is to it. I actually searched for evolutionary causes
of sexual violence, and came to realize that sexual selection forces,
and hence female mate choice, have played an important role in the
evolutionary causes of such violence. These are, as far as I can tell,
scientific facts. I could be mistaken about them; but they are not
obviously absurd, and they don't lead automatically to any terrifying
moral inferences.
Steven Pinker often writes about how people
treat him this way when he talks about evolutionary psychology; I had
always thought he was exaggerating until I actually experienced it
firsthand. People hate evolutionary psychology. It inspires indignation and outrage. It definitely did for these staunch feminists.
And
while right now feminists can get away with this because evolution is
unpopular and evolutionary psychology even more so, I do not think they
will be able to get away with it forever. The science will advance, and
it will become ever more certain and ever more predictive. In fact at
some point we may be able to explain in terms of evolutionary
psychology why evolutionary psychology angers people.
When
that happens, feminism will either need to adapt to the very scientific
facts it has been attacking for decades, or else feminism will die. I
suspect in fact a result somewhere in between; feminism will
begrudgingly accept the facts but only by sacrificing large portions of
its platform and its credibility.
What's more, I am sad about this.
If I really were the woman-hating rape apologist they say I am, I
wouldn't be; I'd be overjoyed. I am sad because they are wrong about me;
I know feminism has done many good things and can still do many more. I
don't want feminism to destroy itself.
Feminism can be reconciled with science; honestly it's not that difficult. Humans are sexually-dimorphic, but we aren't very
sexually-dimorphic; we aren't honeybees or blanket octopus. Indeed, we
can justify certain sex differences based on our real level of
dimorphism: It makes sense that the majority of soldiers and police
officers are male, and we would be perverse to try to change that.
(Women should be allowed to serve of course; but it would be absurd to
demand an exact 50/50 ratio.) What doesn't make sense is the way that
women are treated in business, in science, in politics; in all of these
fields there is virtually no difference in innate ability between men
and women. What doesn't make sense is the way women have to dress and
behave in Muslim countries, or worse the way that women who are raped or
abused are often murdered in so-called "honor killings". What doesn't
make sense is the way many African societies mutilate the genitals of
their young girls. These are real issues that feminism should be dealing
with; feminists need not oppose science to do that.
And to be fair, there are pro-science feminists, like Jen McCreight.
Indeed, I'd like to think of myself as a feminist, because I really do
believe in equality of opportunity regardless of gender. But when I'm
told that men can't really be feminists, or I see feminists who don't
care about sexism against men, or I hear arguments that true feminists
believe in abortion-on-demand, or I get called names when I try to make a
nuanced argument based on evolutionary psychology---well, it becomes
difficult for me to continue to associated myself with that F-word. I
doubt I'm alone in this; and that's why I think feminism is destroying
itself.
Can feminism be saved? What must we do to make this happen?